In France, the future is looking hotter and hotter. The most recent month of May was the warmest on record. However, this is likely to be the case more and more frequently not only in France but right across the planet.

The role of biodiversity, plants, water and life in all its forms has become more crucial than ever before in urban life.

At this moment defined by the seismic challenges of climate change, large-scale urban construction and the depletion of natural resources, extensive urban pollution has become semi-permanent with urban water stress and its systemic effects now threatening our quality of life, putting our health in grave danger as well as that of the very ecosystem itself. The urban phenomenon has completely transformed the way people interact with their surroundings and nature. The emergence of large metropolitan areas, the increased development of megacities but also the inescapable lure, which sometimes extends over hundreds of kilometres, of average-sized and small cities, have all come to revolutionise the way our lives are connected, our urban and rural spaces as well as biodiversity as a whole.

In the space of a century, between 1950 and 2050, the world’s urban population looks set to increase from 1.5 billion people to almost 10 billion. Between the year 2000 and 2050, the cities of the world will become home to no fewer than 3 billion extra people. We are thus living through a wholesale change whereby, in under 100 years, a world comprising a population which used to be 70% rural is becoming one where 70% of us are city-dwellers. But we also know that urban spaces produce somewhere in the region of 70% of all greenhouse gases, as illustrated by the IPCC. For the first time, in 2013, human activity was thus responsible for a level of greenhouse gases which breached the fatal threshold of 400ppm, above which pollution places the future of humanity in serious jeopardy. Yet over 2/3 of automobile transportation and at least 80% of all housing and tertiary buildings are concentrated in urban areas – all of which are major contributors to CO2 emissions and air quality degradation.

What therefore links these new urban areas attempting to develop while respecting the importance of the preservation of biodiversity as the cornerstone of a better life and the fight against global warming? How are we to instil these new urban typologies with social and spatial coherence within the city? Throughout the world, we now bear an urban responsibility with regards to the need to place biodiversity at the heart of urban life for the coming decades. Over the years the city has become ever more inorganic for a number of reasons: the omnipresence of relentless construction work and the primary position granted to the car as a vector of urban planning over the course of nearly a century in which any awareness of climate change has been largely absent. These criteria have shaped an urban world which has relegated biodiversity to a purely functional role, with parks for recreation but without hybridisation, where it has no presence in everyday life.

Plants play a key role in the impact on the urban climate. “Urban canyons”, “islands of urban heat” or heat traps created by buildings and this inorganic world, now represent a growing danger and not only in terms of quality of life but more broadly for social harmony. In truth, can we even imagine life in these urban communities in 5, 10, 20 years without a complete overhaul of the current model? We are starting to identify temperature disparities between these urban environments and the surrounding areas located only 20km away of 5° and even 7°. Without a shadow of a doubt, this will represent one of the most serious social risk factors in the years to come.

Plants are a key part of the ecosystem. They absorb carbon, and make up part of the overall metabolism of urban life. However, plants also make up part of the attraction and quality that defines human relationships in cities. As well as fixing the carbon situation, plants also fix the human situation too. All studies show that a compact, even extremely dense city, which has managed to integrate plant life into certain aspects of everyday life, is a city where residents reduce trips to “get away from it all” in search of “green spaces”. This therefore also has a direct effect on mobility and is a step towards improving chrono-urbanism, towards the quarter of an hour city, where you can enjoy a high quality of social life, and all without travelling for more than a quarter of an hour from your home.

Revegetation and hydrology go hand in hand. Managing water resources today forms part of the concerns at the heart of urban life. The famous statement by the economist Nicolas Stern in his report on climate change seems to ring truer than ever: it is measured in temperature but manifests itself in our daily reality through water scarcity, which is intensifying in every way: evaporation, insufficient or overly violent precipitation, supply difficulties, impacts on the food chain… A change of mindset towards the life cycle of water in the city is one of the major issues to be confronted in the forthcoming decade. This makes complete sense and takes on a strategic perspective in light of the convergence of vegetation, nature and water within the urban transition.

The energy transition, along with a paradigm shift towards the use of carbon-free and renewable sources, is clearly a priority, but will be of little consequence if it is not accompanied by an ambitious urban policy which appreciates the true value of the plant world and addresses the water cycle at every stage of urban life. City parks, urban grids of green and blue space, re-appropriation of water in the city with the use of natural features (watercourses, rivers, canals) or artificial ones (bodies of water, water features…) and bathing areas, have become steps which, internationally, appeal to notions of urban design for all.

The creation and existence of the international organisation of urban parks “WorldUrban Parks” bringing together initiatives from all over the world related to urban parks and open spaces for recreation, is a step forward in the coordination of all stakeholders, regarding this vision and subsequent actions. In an era when urban growth will see 70% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, sharing ideas in order to come up with shared proposals about urban parks, the green city, the conservation of nature, leisure and the entire systemic chain which affects the sport and health of the population living in urban areas is essential. It is a question of working together to build urban lives and healthy cities that are viable and sustainable.